Financial History

The history of organisations, countries and people always matters. It contains a lot of clues with respect to the fundamental drivers of change in organisations, industries and countries. An understanding of this history is therefore very useful when making policies or plans for future projects and developments.

My inspirationThe relevance of financial history became pretty clear to me when, at some point in time, I needed to delve out the history of the use of the PIN-code in the Netherlands. I locked myself up in a room with a huge carriage of archives and funny enough, that is when the virus hit me. What particularly struck me at that point in time, was a quote of the 1920s on strategic drivers in banking, which adequately summarised the board room dynamics that I could observe in the mid-1990s.